sweet face of innocent girlhood were there looking up at him for guidance and help.

But outnumbering all were massed rows of cleanfaced young men whom his enthusiasm had drawn resistlessly. His heart went out to them in yearning sympathy, fighting their battles in the morning of life with the powers and princes of the spirit world for the mastery of the soul.

He felt the sledge-hammer blow of their united heart-beat strike his brain with the pain of a bludgeon.

The agony of fear was now upon him. He saw Van Meter sitting in the central tier of seats watching him sharply out of his little half-closed eyes, the incarnate sign of the mortal enmity of organised wealth, and he must appeal for money.

His great crowd had infinite needs, but much money they did not have. He thought with hope of the twenty millions of people who read his sermons on Monday morning, and of a dozen big-hearted men of wealth he knew in the city, and he was cheered.

He had prepared a most powerful sermon on the text, "The common people heard Him gladly. He felt they could not resist his appeal. And yet in spite of himself his gaze would wander back to Van Meter, drawn by his black eyes as by the charm of an adder.

The Deacon was wondering, as he watched him, what could possibly be the outcome of this daring

insanity. He had been fooled so often by the power of this athletic dreamer, he feared to predict the end, though he felt certain what it would be.

The services were unusually impressive. Special music had been prepared by the choir and rendered magnificently. Gordon read the hymns and Scripture with a feeling so intense the people were thrilled. His prayer had been simple and heartfelt, and had melted scores

of people to tears.

He rose and faced the crowd with the keenest sense of solemnity. The hour was propitious; he could feel the hearts of the people beat responsive to his slightest tone, word or gesture.

As he swept rapidly through his introduction and into his theme he knew he was holding these thousands of breathless listeners in the hollow of his hand. He could feel their heartstrings quiver as he touched them with tenderness or struck them with some mighty thought.

His soul was singing with triumph, when suddenly a ripple of laughter ran along the front tier of the gallery, and a hundred heads were turned upward to see what the disturbance meant.

Had a bolt of lightning struck his spinal column he could not have been more shocked.

He repeated mechanically the last sentence in a dazed sort of way, and a louder ripple of laughter ran the entire length of both galleries and echoed through the main floor.

He stopped, fumbled at his notes, and turned red. The people before him were smiling and craning their necks to see more plainly something on the wide platform of the pulpit.

He suddenly got the insane idea that a fiend had thrust his head in the door behind him and was mocking and grinning.

He turned and looked, and there sat an impudent little back cat with big yellow eyes.

She had been sitting on her haunches blinking at him when he raised his voice or gestured, and the crowd has never yet gathered on this earth in the temple of Baal or Jehovah that can resist a cat accompaniment to the functions of a priest.

When Gordon looked the little cat full in the face, she liked him at once, and in the softest, friendliest treble said:

"Meow!"

And the crowd burst into incontrollable laughter.

At first the full import of the situation did not reach his mind, he was so stunned with surprise. He stood looking at the cat in helpless stupor, and blushing red. And then the sickening certainty crushed him that the day was lost; that it was beyond the power of human genius, or the reach of the spirit of God, to remove that cat and regain control of his audience.

He turned sick with anger and humiliation, and his big bear-like hands clasped his sheet of notes and slowly crushed them.

He continued to look at the cat and she cocked

her head to one side, opened her yellow eyes wider and, slowly, in grieved accents said:

"M-e-o-w!"

Which unmistakably meant, "I'm very sorry you don't like me as well as I do you.'

Again the crowd laughed.

Gordon stepped backward and bent slowly over the cat. She did not look very bright, but she was too shrewd for that movement.

The crowd watched breathlessly. He grasped at her.

She sprang quickly to one side, bowed her back, bushed her tail, and scampered across the platform crying:

"Pist! pist!" and ran up the column that supported the end of the gallery.

The preacher's empty hand struck the bare floor, and the crowd was convulsed.

A young man sitting in the gallery near the column caught the cat as she climbed over the rail, ran to a window and was about to throw her down to the pavement twenty feet below.

Gordon lifted his hand and cried:

"Don't do that, young man-don't hurt her; bring her here.”

It had suddenly occurred to the preacher as he watched Van Meter bending low in his pew overcome with laughter, that he had stooped to this contemptible trick to defeat him and make the solemnest hour

of life ridiculous.

He knew the Deacon had come

to the church earlier than usual. He was sure he

had done it.

A curious smile began to play about his lips, and a cold glitter came into his steel-gray eyes.

He took the cat in his arms and stroked her gently. She purred and rubbed her face against his and moved her feet up and down, sheathing and unsheathing her claws in his robe with evident delight.

The crowd grew still. Instinctively they knew that something big was happening in the soul of the man they were watching.

"This little cat, my friends," he said, “is an innocent actor in a tragedy this morning-but she is the agent of one who is not innocent."

He fixed his gaze on Van Meter, who stirred with uneasy amazement.

"They say that cats sometimes incarnate the souls of dead men. This one is the soul of a living man, my good friend, Deacon Arnold Van Meter, who had her brought here this morning."

The Deacon turned red, drew his head down as though he would pull it within his shoulders, and shrank from the gaze of the crowd.

Gordon handed the cat back to the young man, whispered something to him, and he disappeared. Then, walking up to the pulpit, he snatched off its crimson cloth and threw it behind him. He ran his big muscular hands into the throat of his